The Little Rock Arsenal, Where MacArthur Was Born
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
On the morning of January twenty-sixth, eighteen eighty, a boy was born in the commandant's quarters of the Little Rock Arsenal. His parents were Captain Arthur MacArthur and his wife Mary, who everyone called Pinky. The boy they named Douglas would grow up to become a five-star general, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific, and one of the most consequential military figures of the twentieth century.
His birthplace today anchors MacArthur Park on the east side of downtown Little Rock. The arsenal itself was built in the eighteen thirties, one of a string of federal installations ordered by Congress to arm the interior settlements as the frontier pushed west. The brick tower that still stands was the original magazine and arsenal building, constructed between eighteen forty and eighteen forty-one.
It is one of the oldest surviving structures in the city. During the Civil War the arsenal changed hands twice. Confederate forces seized it in February of eighteen sixty-one, before Arkansas had even formally voted for secession.
Union forces recaptured the city in September of eighteen sixty-three, and the arsenal reverted to federal control. The building witnessed the entire arc of that conflict from a single spot on the riverbank. After the war the installation returned to peacetime use, and it was during this quieter period that Douglas MacArthur arrived.
The family moved frequently, as military families do, and MacArthur left Little Rock as a child. But he returned in memory. Late in his life he wrote of his earliest recollection, his mother lifting him up on the ramparts of the old brick tower to watch the Arkansas River below.
The tower still stands. The view is still there.
